MY FAVORITE UNCLE -- A PROFESSOR RESPONDS

MY FAVORITE UNCLE – A PROFESSOR RESPONDS

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© February 24, 2009

“Sincerity is to speak as we think, to do as we pretend and profess, to perform what we promise, and rally to be what we would seem and appear to be.”

John Tillotson (1630 – 1694), Archbishop of Canterbury

NOTE: I've been in contact with AARP, and they are in the process of evaluating the possible interest that might be generated by publishing this piece titled “My Favorite Uncle,” which deals with my becoming aware of my brilliant uncle’s Alzheimer’s disease. I've often been moved by my correspondence from readers, reading my stuff, but this has to be close to the all time high in its naked sincerity. JRF
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TO MY READERS:

This professor’s sincere expression of his thoughts is the reason I write.
JRF

AN INTERNATIONALLY KNOWN PROFESSOR WRITES:

This is a note created 24 Feb. 2009 to thank James Fisher for the story
he shared of his Uncle who had dementia and where Jim discovered the
nature of Alzheimer's.

Jim

I very much appreciated your story of your Uncle and your visit. I lost my father about 6 years ago and for his last few years he "suffered" from Alzheimer's and I would spend hours with him on the ward of patients with the same condition. I learned a great deal from this and had some wonderful moments together as we relived the past.

When I could I would drive him back to the poorer part of town where I grew up. Your stories of Clinton Iowa often very much help me to recall those past days when I was being shaped by an environment I never choose and could not wait to leave. What helped put me on my path for advanced education and travels to over 70 countries was partially to escape a home on the wrong side of the river.

My home of my first 22 years was Topeka and my part of town was working class but ironically across the train tracks in my neighborhood was the "colored" section, and even poorer.

In my very first year of school everyone was white and we never knew we were poor or in a lower economic class because across the tracks was the "poor" school and no whites went there. Then came the legal case to desegregate started by the Brown family and taken all the way to the supreme court of the land.

Soon I was in a very different school and that decision was a blessing for me and I truly learned how little importance should be given to appearance, skin color or what others said about what is the good or bad side of town.

After I left the military most of my choices of where to live and what to do have been mine, at least up until I started a family now most of those decisions are "we decisions" and more from inertia than careful choice.

In both an unholy war and an unholy separation of people based on shared myths I learned to question, challenge and to learn for myself first hand what was the better way and how hard it can be to not just discover this but to help others to search for it
themselves
.
My drive to understand empowerment, and as you know I have published two books on this theme, was created in me at a very early age. With each passing year I can see that very few have been given the opportunity to learn much if anything about this concept because of the way our culture still holds on to such myths as the concept of zero sum which make it so difficult for us to perceive what created power might
look like. Until our culture examines itself more deeply and decides to abandon a few antiquated myths about how wealth is created and how the economic system must benefit only a few at the cost of sacrificing the many we won't move ourselves out of this very serious recession.

If we can understand that we create the economic structures and that they should not be creating us then we might be able to create a more just society that recognizes the unlimited possibilities of what can be done in economic terms as we work together to create the goods and services that we really desire.

We could create a system where we learn to work or what we want instead of working towards something that others tell us we should own. We might also choose the native tradition of looking seven generations forward rather than wanting it all now and shifting those external costs of environmental recovery to our children.

I truly think that once we experience a challenge to our thinking we are capable
of growing, my shock at an early age put me on a path I have never regretted.

Your lessons from an uncle you so clearly loved helped to make you who you are and this age of economic confusion will force us all to make the effort to learn the lessons we are being shown and recreate a system that better serves us.

You might even call this in some way "shock therapy" and it could be exactly what we needed to push us out of our comfortable complacency and force us to act in ways that we can agree on are better.

You have given me a gift to see my past through your reflections, this last missive was very touching and my experience with dementia is a shared one.

One of the beliefs that helped me through this period was the concept of several cultures that this phase of life can be seen as "half-life and half-death." This thought served me well then, helped me to accept the condition, and also helped me to prepare for what most likely will be at some time in the future my own experience of those last few years in this play called life.

I have continued to be most curious about this last act of our three-act play. It could last, as long as another 3 or 4 decades or as we all know it could be done in the next 3-4 seconds.

I feel as if I have always known this to be the case and seldom fear death, even in my time in Vietnam or some rather tricky moments in Somalia or high in the Himalayas I can't seem to relate to death with fear. Death is more a wonderment and this is why this notion of a half-life seemed to be such a gift.

This Alzheimer's disease can be experienced with great fear, most around my father were fearful or angry, but he and I shared some very special moments and I was so fortunate in that he never really forgot who I was.

And I with those hours spent just sitting by him in a hospital ward will never forget just being there with him in those hours and how difficult it was to just be with him while all around other patients were acting out their final few years of life.

Each visit was a lesson I needed to learn, never easy but always important.

The half death side of this condition is what also gives me hope, some call this a long good bye and for us it very much was. Likely in no other situation could I have spent so much time with my dad in his last few years. A long good bye is for some of us a chance to just be with each other, nothing has to happen and nothing has to be said but at some special level just being together is what is most remembered and most
valued.

To accept the just being side of my life has not been easy. Like so many of us in this culture I too often feel if I am not DOING I am less alive. Slowly over many, many years I am beginning to value just BEING and though it so often feels like an unnatural act my father in his last few days was finally able to teach me something about this lesson.

Of all of my lessons learned from him this one might be one of the most important and until I started to write this note of thanks of you I am not even sure I knew this.

So again thanks and keep being that writer that you were born to be, and for you I do hope you also have the chance to just BE and in that continue to take in all those wonderful human stories but not always feel you have to DO something about them.

Just sharing them means a lot to me and I am sure you could hear this echoed wide and far as you take the time to just sit and take in that story of how much what you are doing is appreciated.

So for me I wish you and BB get a quiet moment to just stop and enjoy knowing that together you both are making some very nice music.....

K

PS Jim, you may notice I edited this away from my normal running commentary in all lower case for email exchanges. I did this because I think I may be following your example and want to leave a bit of myself behind in a form that others may read. I doubt if any of this could be that important but I do feel as I am sure you do we have lived in some most interesting times and they just get to be more interesting every day.

k